I began my career as a graduate student in literature knowing that, with how literary studies stand now, I would have to choose for my focus between my two great fascinations: 19th-century Russian and 20th-century American literature. The former seemed pre-destined to remain a hobby or a neglected interest. But thanks to the inventiveness of Foreign Literatures in America as well as to the slippery categories of “foreign,” “literatures,” and “America(n)” that the project seeks to explore, I have found an exciting professional opportunity to open up scholarly avenues between these two disciplinary fields. No one, of course, could argue that so-called American literature exists outside a world genealogy of writing that looks to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky et al. as masters of their arts. Were an undergraduate or graduate student to pursue and argue for the importance of a Russian text’s influence on an American one, professors and the scholarly community could not deny the validity of such an argument. In such a transnational project, however, the sense remains that not only are geographic, political, and temporal boundaries crossed but also violated are the sometimes seemingly more strictly policed border of disciplinary fields. Although, beyond Foreign Literatures in America, American literary studies are moving in different ways toward boundary-troubling methodologies, the field retains a strong residual definition as constitutively, for example, “not-Russian,” not that which is foreign. The FLA project works to liberate us from that sensibility. Rather than passively accepting the borders of American literature as a line marking zones of inclusion and exclusion to be crossed, FLA makes the move of being all inclusive, recognizing the historicity of borders and disciplinary categories while illuminating and giving primacy of inquiry to the networks of cultural influence that underlie and overlay those categories. Thus, as Executive Editor of the FLA’s Russian Authors digital archive, I am given scholarly legitimacy as an (aspiring) Americanist to explore the impact of text authored outside the United States upon text authored within, all under the newly inclusive umbrella of American literary studies.

Of course, as one person in a large, ambitious but new and still growing project, I am still in the first stages of this Russian Authors archive. So far I’ve put together a foundational collection of reception materials about Dostoevsky from a variety of periodicals from 1900-1945. Tolstoy is my next subject, and already reception of his works have proved much more widespread, so I’ve extended my time frame from 1890-1960. Neither of these collections is intended to be complete; both are meant to be starting points with much work still waiting to be done by current and future FLA participants.

This endeavor has occasioned two main obstacles, but both have hopefully been effectively conquered. First, developing a methodology for collecting and curating digital materials was a challenge; although I am quite computer literate, this has been my first archival and digital project. Along with the rest of the Executive Board, I had to discover by trial and error the most effective way to store our data and meta-data for documents. At this time we have decided upon standards for collecting and cataloging documents, but I suspect that we will have to continue adapting as we encounter new issues as FLA grows. The second obstacle was transforming analogue documents into digital items. Microfilm has been my primary source for reception materials, and a large portion of the reproductions are not good enough quality for optical character recognition (OCR). Still, the Executive Board has generally agreed that it is still worthwhile to collect imperfect copies of documents even if they are not computer-legible. As a result, in the future others can contribute to the archival aspect of FLA by locating better quality copies; rather than viewing this imperfection as a problem, we can treat it as an open invitation for people to participate in small or large ways.

In closing, I can only emphasize the professional opportunities the FLA embodies to re-imagine literary discourse.

Nicholas Slaughter is in the Department of English at the University of Maryland.